Dear Fiona: I can't abide my husband's taste in bathrooms – what can I do?

Dear Fiona

My partner and I are at a total impasse over bathrooms. We have three more to do, and every time the design comes up in conversation we end up in a terrible argument. I abhor large tiles; I think they look bland, and bog standard, like they’ve been conceived by developers for cost effectiveness and speed, and have told him so. He, on the other hand, has what could almost be called a phobia of grout, and the cleaning and upkeep of it. He will therefore only consider very large tiles with a rectified edge, meaning our options are limited, and frankly I hate them all. I suggested microcement, but he fears that as our house is old (1700s) it will inevitably crack when the house moves.

Oh – and he’s also obsessed with maximising storage! I just think that with floor to ceiling built-in units and enormous tiles over the floors and walls, I am doomed to a life of bathing in what I fear will feel like a kitchen, and a dreadfully un-chic kitchen at that.

Please help, bathrooms seem like a really hard area to compromise in – I don’t think mid-sized tiles would make either of us happy. So what do we do? We can’t afford an interior designer, or that’s the direction I’d go in, because I know that they would be able to do something genius with storage. Also, I’ve had some really pretty hand painted tiles from Emery & Cie on a mood board for ages.

Love

A Small(er) Tile-Fancier XX

Dear Fiona

My newish husband and I have just come back from our local bathroom showroom, having had the most almighty row, and not bought any taps – which is what we went for. He wants black taps. We live in a standard Victorian terrace, and I’d like standard Victorian-esque taps. I had wanted a footed Victorian-esque bath, too, but I lost that battle. Black taps however – well, that’s the hill I’m prepared to die on.

Or maybe it’s not the hill, and I just let them him have them. I got my way on the kitchen design – and I suppose I’m not going to spend that much time in either of the bathrooms. Or maybe we do one bathroom with black taps, and I get chrome in the other? Would it be weird that the bathrooms themselves wouldn’t match? It’s what we’re doing for room colours because we can’t agree on those either . . . Oh my goodness, are we going to be dividing the decorating decisions like this forever – with me having to occasionally allow him free rein of his horrible taste?

What do you advise?

Thank you,

Chromed Brass Forever XX

Dear Tile-Fancier, and Dear Chromed Brass,

Thank you for your letters. Gosh it’s tricky when we don’t have the same predilections as our significant others, even trickier when everyone is strongly opinionated. However, it’s far from unusual, as your twin letters evidence; taste is subjective, after all. A marriage counsellor I happened to speak to in passing did mention that you probably shouldn’t denigrate your husband’s ideas to his face – but perhaps you haven’t, and either way it rather sounds like each of is giving as good as you get, and vice versa. The good news, Chromed Brass (hereafter CB), is that according to research your individual tastes are likely to become more aligned with the passage of time. But that’s variable, and you can’t hold off on all interior design decisions until that moment comes, and right now your conflicting notions relate to what is one of my favourite rooms to think about – a room, CB, that you absolutely don’t want to give up on. For it’s been a long time since a bathroom was purely about function – if indeed it ever was.

We all know that a lengthy soak in a steaming tub is one of the most effective cure-alls there is, whether for staving off a cold or encouraging emotional recuperation, but it can also be a place of discovery – remember Archimedes? More recently, Agatha Christie came up with several of her plots while lying in a bath and eating apples, Virginia Woolf conceived The Years while marinating in hot water at Monk’s House, while Winston Churchill strategised large parts of World War Two from his bathroom. And appearances matter; but I’m getting ahead of myself – this is not what you’re asking – though it does hint at the direction that I’m going in. Because it may not seem so when you’re having a row in a bathroom showroom, or picturing a room that you fear will resemble a dreadfully un-chic kitchen, but I am confident that– even equipped with these clashing thoughts – you can, by way of compromise, research, and analytical vision (and de-escalation) create bathrooms of genuine splendour.

Let’s look at compromise, which, Tile-Fancier (hereafter TF), you brought up – and both of you in your letters have identified the obvious definition, and with it, options; mid-sized tiles that would make no one happy, and one bathroom with black taps and another with chrome (which is perfectly fine, incidentally; sanitary ware and hardware do not need to match between rooms) too, but I suspect you wouldn’t have written to me had you been content with such half-measures.

Happily, there’s another means of defining the word. Philip Hooper, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, identifies compromise as “constructive dialogue, which should take both of you in a new direction.” He tells of once having had to step away from wallpaper and pattern when he had a client who was adamantly against both, which led him to applying stretched velvet to walls – proving Brandon Schubert’s point that compromise can be “when the magic really happens.” Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest a tap-less room, but I do recommend that all of you – including your husbands – agree to relinquish what you think you’ve got your hearts set on. It may initially seem a loss, but “blessed are the hearts that can bend, for they shall never be broken,” said Saint Francis de Sales, who was known for his gentle approach to dogmatic division. It is this sort of compromise, incidentally, that can genuinely be a decorating superpower.

However, before you completely put your preferred tiles and taps out of your minds, you might want to each think about why it is that you so like them, though I can hazard a guess. TF, it strikes me that you like colour and pattern, while your partner is big on practicality. CB, I reckon you’re a traditionalist, and your husband is more into modern (unless it’s simply that he likes the colour black). Happily, these can absolutely be combined: may I direct you towards the research I mentioned earlier, and the many schemes by designers in the House & Garden Top 100, and propose that your next step is – in your couples – to peruse this helpful bathroom roundup put together by Nicola Harding. There’s traditional, there’s modern, there’s modern-traditional, there’s plenty of pattern and colour and practicality – and there are even some rather appealing large tiles in Angelica Squires’s Victorian terrace (above). You could also flick through decorating books, trawl through vintage examples (Benedict Foley has confessed a weakness for Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace bathroom with its heart-shaped jacuzzi) and Instagram hashtags (while knowing that some ideas that end up on Instagram work less well in real life), look through back issues of House & Garden, and find out what people wish they had known before they did their own bathroom renovation. And, since layout is vital – not only at the plumbing stage, but also for comfort of use – you want to research best practice of that, too

You’re essentially looking to expand your ideas of what is possible because you can’t opt for something, or even like something, if you don’t know that it exists. Read the credits of every image, and you will discover that there are alternatives to tiles and microcement, i.e. tadelakt which is Olivia Outred’s go-to in wet rooms – and its history of being used in ancient Moroccan riads suggests it will probably survive the movement of a 18^th-century house. You’ll notice that there are clever ways of disguising built-in storage, so that you don’t know that it’s there – but also that bathrooms can have proper furniture. And you’ll find the full range of tap options – shape, finish, colour, all of it. In addition, I want to point out that Epoxy grout doesn’t discolour, wallpaper is a possibility and can be varnished for protection (you want a flat finish), cork is a viable alternative to a tiled floor, a limited tile run – for instance, a splashback over a basin – can quell obsession, and marble is decidedly low on grout (though it does have a significant carbon footprint, so maybe only a contender if you’re definitely aiming for longevity.)

And once you know all this, you may find you all surprise yourselves, because taste is fluid – like the bendable hearts that Francis de Sales suggested we should encourage – and there’s nothing like the beauty of someone else’s execution to swerve the course of our desires.

Do remember, however, that you are not trying to convert your significant other to your bathroom beliefs (I know it’s tempting, and it may, of course, happen – in either direction). But you are looking for crossover in taste – note every time you both like a particular bathroom, or aspect of a bathroom, and take that as the start of what Olivia describes as “your design language.” Alongside, bearing in mind that you are each blessed with what some might feel is an abundance of bathrooms, is the necessity of establishing exactly what you require from each: do they even all need to fully waterproof, TF? Can any of them have a secondary use? For example, my bathroom is also my dressing room – and I happen to know that Francis Sultana has a bath in his dressing room, too. Benedict Foley has combined a bathroom and boot room – though it’s more a boot room that also has a bathroom in it, “if you know where to look,” says Benedict.

Then – finally – it’s simply a question of bringing everything you know and have learnt and like together; i.e. analytical vision. There is, of course, a chance that you’re going to come back to this letter, because the plan hasn’t worked and you still find yourself at an impasse. In which case, please know that there is another option: an interior designer doesn’t have to cost the earth. There exist some that work on a room by room basis, and Nicola Harding offers an hour’s consultation. But I hope that at least some aspects of the exercise prove useful and that, whichever route you go, you come up with something that makes you happier than you imagined you would be.

With love,

Fiona XX